I sent screenshots from Hard Disk Sentinel to the seller of the microdrives, and they refunded my money but didn’t want the drives back. Even then, it’d probably be a good idea to destroy the drives since re-use of them would be a bit… fraudulent after getting refunded. I decided to throw the drives around to see how well they’d hold up to physical abuse.

The Microdrive died when I whipped it against the concrete floor of my basement, go figure. The impact was strong enough to bend the steel frame but not enough to shatter the glass hard disk inside. Obviously, the disk didn’t spin up or enumerate in Hard Disk Sentinel. Now that the drive’s murder has been accomplished, it’s autopsy time!

Circuit board exposed

Microdrive opened

Other end visible

Read/write head preamp

It’s a 1-inch disk alright…

… and only .4 mm thick!

I think this drive needs some defragmenting…

The Seagate ST1 was put through a similar treatment, but it died much less gracefully when plugged in. The main controller chip (I think) shorted internally, and after about 15 seconds of being powered up, it released the magic smoke. The board’s plastic liner was melted where the chip shorted out. The drive internals weren’t much different than the Hitachi drives so I didn’t bother taking pictures of the drive’s insides.

Plastic liner melted

Liner removed – note chip-on-board construction

Epoxy packages removed, chip areas visible

Protective cover (label) removed

Hard disk magnet on backing

After the damage was done, the drives were promptly put in a small plastic bag to be put in an electronics recycle bin.

A few weeks ago I decided to hop onto eBay and buy a couple microdrives for fun. If you haven’t heard of the term, a microdrive is a hard disk drive that fits into a CompactFlash slot. These were intended to be the future in mobile storage, with 20 GB drives being the biggest around 2006. Of course, these drives proved to be very delicate, and besides, now we get 128 GB microSD cards!

The drives I purchased appeared to be pulled from some old iPod minis. The seller tried to remove the Apple logo with some sort of solvent, but left the smudges behind.

Seagate ST1 4 GB

ST1 back labeling – note the smudged-out Apple logo on the left of the card

The Hitachi 4 GB Microdrive

Microdrive back labeling – note the smudged-out Apple logo on the top right… all that’s left is the (R) symbol

The problem with the iPod mini drives is that their CompactFlash interface is disabled. That is, the drive is really just a PATA drive in a CompactFlash’s body. Few devices that aren’t PCs support CompactFlash cards in this mode.

Seagate ST1 in Sony Clie

Being the curious type, I popped the drives into my Sony Clie NX73V, which I still carry with me even though it’s 11 years old 🙂 . It has support for CompactFlash Type I and II (thin and thick, basically), and, according to the properties window in the OS, uses the ATA protocol to talk to the cards. This means it should interface with the cards just fine… right?

… nope! No dice with the ST1.

It enumerates at least…

… ish.

First, I popped the Hitachi Microdrive in my Clie. One second after inserting the card, I see a question mark in the memory card’s taskbar icon. No dice.

Then, I moved on to the Seagate ST1. It spun up, but the Clie hung for about 30 seconds before finally displaying “The card cannot be recognized”. However, it did at least enumerate with the OS and I could pull up the manufacturer and model number of the drive.

Hm, well those ideas were dashed pretty quickly. Later, I bought a CompactFlash-to-PATA adapter, and a PATA-to-SATA adapter so I could hook it up to my laptop. From there, I used Hard Disk Sentinel (great software, by the way!) to analyze the drives and see if they have S.M.A.R.T. health reporting…

Screenshot of Hitachi Microdrive

S.M.A.R.T. data for Microdrive – note that Reallocated Sectors Count has a red X on it…

… and they do, alright! In fact, the drives I purchased were both soon to be dead. The Seagate drive had hundreds of bad sectors and a failing disk head/head actuator. The Hitachi drives had so many reallocated sectors that the drive literally ran out of spares. Too bad the Microdrive didn’t report how many sectors were reallocated though…

The drives themselves were in really bad shape, as seen below:

Microdrive’s surface scan. Red blocks here mean that the disk had no spare sectors to replace them. Dark green means that the access time was rrrreeeealllllyyyy sloooooow…